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Wearside Jack, the Sketch, and Nine Missed Chances
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Peter Sutcliffe sat across from detectives nine separate times — and walked free each time. This chapter of the Yorkshire Ripper case exposes the moral and systemic failures that let a killer keep killing.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before you know the full story, it sounds like a mystery. Thirteen women murdered across five years.
On the thirtieth of October, nineteen seventy-five, a milkman named Alan Routledge was making his rounds in Chapeltown, Leeds, just after seven in the morning. He found a body in a recreation ground.
Here's the key thing to understand about how the investigation collapsed. It wasn't one catastrophic error.
The investigation didn't just fail technically. It failed morally, and the moral failure made the technical failures worse.
In March nineteen seventy-eight, a letter arrived at the West Yorkshire Police inquiry. Then another.
On the second of January, nineteen eighty-one, a patrol car stopped a Rover in the Broomhill area of Sheffield. The car had false number plates.
In nineteen eighty-four, Sutcliffe was transferred from prison to Broadmoor, the high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire. He'd been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
The most consequential document to come out of the Yorkshire Ripper investigation wasn't the trial verdict. It was a government report.
Five years. Thirteen women dead.
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